Why did I guess that you would?

He’s an old acquisition from NYC Maxilla & Mandible, and so much more beautiful than Julian Schnabel’s specimen. FB photos can only hint at his charisma and kissability. (To be fair, he was a bit rank for a good three years, and occasionally emits a dog-magnet scent mote even 15 years on.)

The varying textures are fascinating, and convince one – beyond the ability of a textbook – that bone is as dynamic and mutable as any other body system.

Thanks. Clive, keep in mind our former neighbor made stuff up at random, so that may or may not have been true. (For example, she told us an old, falling-down shack in the woods belonged to a hobo. Two decades later I met a guy who spent summers up here in the 50s, and who led me to the spot where that shack had stood — a children’s clubhouse.) I always assumed they took it out and shot it, but the odd thing was that it was so close to the tenant house. You’d think they would’ve wanted to get farther away from the smell.

“A scattering of tiny polished ninepins” is indeed, as Luisa suggest, a very poetic image!

Dave’s poem is wonderful. And your response is poetry too, Clive. Thanks for these beauties.

Wait — what? You kiss a hippo skull every night? I want to hear more about that!

It’s strange, this compulsion to collect skulls. I have two myself in the studio, a ram’s and a fox’s. The fox in particular is a beauty, all flowing, back-sweeping contours, its teeth needle sharp and perfect. It must have died young. Nevertheless like poor old mule Charlie, with no flesh to secure them snugly, the teeth slip their sockets and drop out, a scattering of tiny polished ninepins around her.

Double-love this, and would even if I did not kiss a hippo skull every night. The invocation of a Walter Rothschild/Tring child-assembled museum is wonderful, and particularly I am taken with:

The zigzag sutures where
the parts of the skull fit together
made them self-evidently whole

Architecture is surely more than sufficient magic when you are v. young.